Know nothing about Afghanistan? Blame the death of the documentary

There is a moment in Sean Langan's documentary, Tea With the Taliban, that tells us more about who we are dealing with than a thousand newspaper pieces about the supposedly indomitable fighters. To begin with, the group of young Taliban soldiers who have agreed to take Langan to the front line are tight-lipped and pretty much immune to his charms. When he tries to break the ice by showing them the workings of a device banned by their leaders, we steel ourselves for the tornado of fury that we imagine this infringement will provoke. Happily, these boys are as susceptible as any of their sex to the lure of shiny metal boxes with neat little buttons to press. They have a good look at the camera, then dance around in front of it leering madly like children in a Sunny D frenzy. "Look how handsome Allah has made me!" one shouts when he sees the pictures.

Watching clips of this film again at the Sheffield documentary festival, I was struck by how unusual these scenes still seemed. A great deal has happened in Afghanistan since Langan went there last year, so logic might suggest that we are better acquainted with its people than we were when his film was first shown. Given the amount of coverage there is about the region every day, you'd think that we would be well informed about the identity of its inhabitants.

It certainly feels as if we are. Few of the newspaper readers currently struggling with quantities of information that no mere human being could digest would have any further questions about the area. By now, most of us think we are experts on the history and politics that set the scene for the present conflict and even I, if pressed, could find Kandahar on a map. What I don't know, however, is what that city actually looks like. Nor am I able to imagine what any of the people who live there did before the bombs started to drop. Forced to construct a picture from the scraps of evidence gleaned from the media, I'd say the women spent their days crying and dreaming of lipstick while the men strode about barking theological maxims and beating their indomitable chests. Apart from Langan's film, I've seen very little that would help me flesh out these Foreign Office caricatures.

Far from contributing to a deeper understanding of the prewar lives of the people involved in the conflict, the mainstream news agenda simply confirms the idea that the Afghans are a people with no existence beyond their religion. All those acres of print about the meaning of this or that strand of Islam give us no indication of the complex and contradictory attitude of "the believers" to their theology. As we see from the scene above, there are times when the letter and law of the harshest definition of Islam can be reinterpreted according to personal preference. We don't know how often this happens, largely because the news deals in generalisations that cannot be adjusted to the subtlety of real situations. It also generates the cliches that stand in for this reality in its absence.

One of the most pernicious cliches is the idea that Afghanistan is a nation that wasn't worth bombing because its cities are already "rubble". The anti-war commentators who think they're helping their case by talking of the way the bombs have simply turned "rubble to rubble" are giving their enemies succour by summoning an impression of a barren wasteland where nobody actually lives. Deprived of a context, the Afghans in this reading can only be victims or warriors. They can't be mothers, husbands or daughters without some sense of the setting in which their everyday lives take place.

News reporters don't have time for this. The only group of media workers with the patience and inclination to give us a real idea of what foreigners get up to when they're not under the cosh are the documentary makers. Britain has a proud tradition in this area, and yet TV executives seem less and less convinced of the importance of using the medium for the unspectacular business of showing us how other people live. The idea seems too low-key - there's no need for computer animation or five-year voyages to film the fish that no human being has seen - until, that is, something like this happens and they wonder why there are so few programmes worth reshowing.

The reason, of course, is that they don't commission enough of this kind of stuff any more. It's thought of as rather unglamorous, and commissioning editors much prefer the reality-TV version of the rest of the world, which sees it as a challenge course for Brits who want to "test themselves to the limits".

The Channel 4 series Lost is just the most recent example of a genre that casts other countries as problems to be overcome. Like the contestants, the viewer is shocked by how smelly and inefficient are the places they are dropped into. Such fun as there is in the format is derived from seeing how long it takes the Brits to find ways of conning the foreigners into giving them food and lifts to facilitate their passage back to civilisation.

They've yet to film one in Afghanistan, but no doubt, when all this is over, they'll send a team of London models to see how long it takes them to pick their stilettoed way across the bombed-out shell of Kandahar. Then we'll get to see what it looks like.